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June
5, 1995 June 14 1995 October 3, 1995 The autumn foliage at Garrett’s house is even better than he expected.
October 11, 1995 Garrett takes an eight-day vacation to Quebec, Montreal, and Ottawa. He is delighted by the huge variety of food in the restaurants, American and French.
November 11, 1995 Garrett is now visiting Boston monthly for women. Not all of them are hookers. Normally he would head back north around 2:00 P.M., but this time he decides to leave at 11:00 P.M. As he approaches the entrance to the underground garage, a tall muscular Negro man about twenty-six, comes out of the nearby shrubbery, and pulls a large hunting knife. Brandishing it, says,
“Give me all your money or you’re dead.”
Garrett strides briskly forward, feigns high with his left hand, then comes in under the knife slash with a hard kick, breaking the man’s left knee cap. The robber clutches his knee, bending forward, crying out in agony. Garrett kicks him hard in the face. The man sprawls forward and falls flat. With a reluctant grimace, Garrett stomps the back of the man’s neck, dislodging skull from spinal column, He leaves the area quickly, stops at a pay phone, and calls the police, explaining what happened without disclosing identity, simply for the sake of the man’s family. Truth is always best.
December 24, 1995 Garrett skis Bretton Woods at twenty degrees below zero. There are beautiful views with orange feather clouds, but it’s too cold. He will ski only twenty degrees above zero and sunny from here on, mostly March and April.
January
1996 February 25 1996
At Wildcat Mountain, Garrett can see the top of Mount Washington like it’s next door. March 10 1996
At Cannon Mountain, Garrett likes the view from the Rim Trail. The rime frost is impressive on adjacent Mount Lafayette, with the highway winding through like an endless serpent.
April 12 1996 At Sunday River, Garrett is delighted by the detachable quad, especially when he realizes that he is going up the mountain faster than the skiers are coming down, no lift lines.
July 23, 1996 Garrett visits Cambridge Massachusetts for an outdoor concert. A big unshaven white man in work clothes has apparently mistaken him for someone else. When Garrett enters the men’s room, the man follows him in, grabs him by the shoulder, spins him around, and pins him against the wall in a choke hold. Garrett puts his hands together as if in prayer, thrusts hard upward like a wedge, breaking the man’s grip, claps the man’s ears hard, pulls his right fist back, and makes a hard knuckle jab to the esophagus. The man gasps, falls to the floor, clothing his throat, and Garrett leaves quickly. As he heads home, he is disappointed for having had to miss the music. He also reflects on how easily this attack could have gone the other way, since the man was way bigger and much stronger.
January 10, 1997 At Jay Peak, Garret feels like it’s the Winter Olympics as he goes to lunch among the flags of many nations, stopping to talk with a Canadian snow-border. Later he enjoys a trail called Ullr’s Run. February 8 1997
Riding up at Spruce Peak, Garrett is dazzled by the wind-bent trees, frozen in that position, covered with ice that refracts the morning sun to look like thousands of colored jewels. On the ground, the crystalline snow sparkles like billions of tiny diamonds.
February 16 1897
February 18 1997
March 10 1997 At Bolton Valley, to enhance his speed on the trail, Bear Run, Garrett pretends he is being chased by a huge grizzly. It works very well. Heading to lunch down below, he catches an edge in ice, and does a 360-degree maneuver to keep from falling. A couple about thirty sees him, and comments on the sheer beauty of it.
March
22 1997 April 11 1997
At Loon Mountain, Garrett reaches
breakneck speeds traversing a steep super highway of well-groomed snow. May 1997
September 19. 1997 Around 2:00 A.M. Garrett and a cute young hooker with kind eyes, named Cindy, come out of a brothel in Chinatown, smiling after a nice conversation with the head Madame. After they cross the street, a young Chinese man advances on them, and slaps Cindy across the face hard. Garrett reaches to grab the man’s arm, and the man launces a fast kick to Garrett’s nuts. Garret crosses his arms in a beautiful low block, but not fast enough. A little of the kick gets through to hurt his left seed. The man starts to open his coat. With his right fist, Garrett jabs the man’s esophagus with his famous knuckle punch. As the gun comes out, Garrett takes it easily with his left hand, and pitches it away to the side, as the man falls to the pavement. Garrett kisses Cindy on the cheek and leaves quickly. Later, when he thinks about it, he is regretful that he didn’t keep the gun, because it looked like a Walther PPK. Garrett resolves to visit Montreal instead, for a few months and to wear a false beard and shades the next time he visits Boston. On the way home he thinks,
“I think the world has always been this dangerous, but that’s three times now, I would probably be dead if I hadn’t studied martial arts with Van and Walter while I was at Hamilton.”
December 5 1997 Killington is a spider web of trails draped across six mountains. There is even one trail ten miles long. Very cold today. Nice views of fairly unspoiled area.
January 8 1998 At Okemo, Garrett runs into Cherylee Nutting, a little cutie he met at the New Magoons health food store in Littleton last year.
January 16 1998 While visiting St. Johnsbury, in the lobby at Golden City, Garrett meets a beautiful tall blond girl, Pamela. They enjoy the awesome Egg Foo Yong special and talk.
February
7 1998 March 8 1998 At Cranmore, Garrett shushes down the wide East Slope, and is propelled by momentum like a sports car with stiff suspension, along a narrow road well into the woods.
March 22 1998 At Sugar Bush South, Garrett’s legs turn to rubber by 3:30 P.M.
March 27 1998 While skiing Attitash, Garrett meets a Russian Olympian. They talk briefly, ski down Upper Ptarmigan together, and part at the Ptarmigan headwall. Today is frozen granular. Garrett prefers single diamond trails even under good conditions, and takes Saco. At lunch time, Garrett decides to ski down the NASTAR racing slope to the cafeteria. It turns out to be ungroomed, frozen solid. His skis won’t cut the ice, so he goes into a crouch and shushes straight down. The momentum is so great that it carries him completely across the large flat area, without any skating at all, right to the cafeteria.
April 3. 1998 Garrett is visiting Alaska. In a small town near Anchorage he walks into a restaurant for lunch. There is a group of three local Eskimo guys playing live music. One younger man has long hair and is playing bass guitar. The crew-cut percussion man has a very small drum kit, featuring a high hat. The long haired singer-guitar player was once a handsome man, but his face is disfigured as if deeply clawed by a bear. Massive scars run diagonally from scalp to chin. It’s difficult to look at him without wincing. They are doing a song,
“Rip-Tear-Chew the Eskimo bear Nobody wants to see him around here” boong chick a boong chick a boong chick “Ahh-ah-ah” (singer raises hands as if under attack) boong chick a boong chick a boong chick “Ahh-ah-ah” tik, tik, tik, tik, t tika, t tika boong chick a boong chick a boong chick, tik, tik, tik, tik, two chicka, two chicka boong chick a boong chick a boong chick, boong chick a boong chick a boong chick.
At the bar, a fur trapper turned pimp, with two girls, for the sake of any stranger, smiles knowingly at the “two chicka” part of the song, as he has on a thousand dreary afternoons here in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
The land, trees, and sky here are very beautiful, and Garrett decides to invite Pamela, now his very serious girlfriend, to shack up with him here for a few days. |
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